Basic Points About The Zionist Israeli-Arab Palestinian Conflict
Palestine, the land claimed by both sides was known under this term in international relations (IR) from 1918 till 1948. Moreover, the same term was applied by Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to designate a Holy Land [...]
The Zionist Israeli-Arab Palestinian conflict today is one of if not the most significant global security problems to be dealt with.[1] However, this conflict is historically not much old as it is a pretty modern issue, dating, in fact, since the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The focal question is: What is conflict about? In other words: What are those two different groups fighting for?
At first glance, it can be understood that behind the conflict reasons is a confession as those two peoples are of different denominations: the Jews are predominantly Judaists while the Palestinian predominant confession is Islam but includes Christians and Druze. However, the obvious religious differences are not the fundamental cause of the struggle. In fact, the conflict started a century ago and continued to be strife for the land.
Palestine, the land claimed by both sides was known under this term in international relations (IR) from 1918 till 1948. Moreover, the same term was applied by Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to designate a Holy Land. However, as a consequence of the wars from 1948 to 1967 between the Arabs and Israel, this land (some 10.000 sq. miles) became today divided into three parts: 1) Israel; 2) the West Bank; and the Gaza Strip.
However, both groups have a different background in claiming this land for themself:
The Zionist Jewish claims to Palestine are founded on the Biblical promise to Abraham and all his descendants. The historical foundations of such claims are based on the fact that on the territory of Palestine have been established the ancient kingdoms of the Jews: Israel and Judea. Politically, this historical claim is backed by the need of the Jews for the nation-state to get rid of European anti-Semitism, especially after the WWII holocaust.
Arab Palestinians are claiming the same land based on their continuous living in Palestine for hundreds of years and on the fact that they were the demographic majority until 1948. In addition, they reject the confessional-ideological notion of the Zionist Jews that the Jewish kingdoms based on the Old Testament can constitute any rational and moral/scientific foundations to be used for acceptable modern claim especially taking into consideration that the Jews left Palestine after the occupation of the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD (for 2000 years!). However, the Arab Palestinians also use the arguments from the Bible and, therefore, claim that Abraham’s son Ishmael is the forefather of the Arabs and that God promised the Holy Land to all children of Abraham which simply means to the Arabs too (Arabs are Semitic people as Jews). But the crucial issue from the Arab Palestinian viewpoint is that they cannot forget Palestine as a matter of compensation for the holocaust against the Jews committed in Europe (in which Arab Palestinians did not participate at all).
The Palestinians and diaspora
The term Palestinians from the very political-historical standpoint today refers to those people of Palestine whose historical roots are traced to this land as defined by the British Mandate’s borders being the Arabs of Christian, Muslim, or Druze denominations. It is estimated that today some 5.6 million Palestinians are living within the British Mandate Palestine’s frontiers which are now divided into three parts: 1) The State of Zionist Israel; 2) The territory of the West Bank; and 3) the Gaza Strip. The last two were occupied by Israel during The 1967 Six Days War. It is also claimed that today some 1.5 million Palestinians are living as citizens of Israel. Therefore, the Palestinians compose around 20% of the Israeli population. In addition, some 2.6 million Palestinians live in the West Bank including 200.000 living in East Jerusalem and around 1.6 million living in the Gaza Strip (at least before the current Israeli genocide on the Gazans which started in October 2023). However, there are around 5.6 million Palestinian people who are living in the diaspora, outside Palestine mainly in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
Among all Palestinian diaspora groups, the largest one (some 2.7 million) lives in Jordan (not taking into consideration the territory of the West Bank which legally belonged to the Kingdom of Jordan). Many of them still live in those refugee camps established in 1949 while others became town dwellers. Some Palestinian refugees took refuge in Saudi Arabia or other Arab Gulf states while others moved to other countries of the Middle East or the rest of the world. Among all Arab states, only Jordan granted citizenship to those Palestinians living there. That became, however, the formal reason for some Zionist Jews to claim that Jordan is, in fact, already a national state of the Palestinians and, therefore, there is no real need to establish an independent state of Palestine. On the other hand, nonetheless, many Palestinians claim that the USA is, basically, the national state of the Jews, and, subsequently, Israel in the Middle East does not need to exist (as the second national state of the Jews).
Nevertheless, the situation of the Palestinian refugees in South Lebanon is particularly disastrous as many Lebanese are blaming them for the civil war that ruined the country in 1975−1991 and, therefore, demand that all Lebanese Palestinians have to be resettled somewhere else as a precondition to re-install peace in the country. Especially the Lebanese Christians are very anxious to rid the country of the Muslim Palestinians as they fear that the Palestinians are undermining the religious balance of Lebanon.
Israeli Palestinians
When Israel was proclaimed as an independent state in May 1948, there were only some 150.000 Arab Palestinians within its borders. On one hand, all of them were granted the citizenship of Israel which means automatically and with the right to vote.[2] However, on the other hand, they de facto have been second-class citizens (i.e. the ethnic and confessional minority) for the very reason that Israel was officially defined as both a Jewish state and the state of the Jewish people.[3] The Arab Palestinians are not the Jews (even though both are the Semites).[4] Most of those Israeli Palestinians were subjected before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War to the military authority which restricted their free movement followed by other civic rights like work, free speech, association, etc. The Palestinians were not allowed to be the full members of the Israeli trade union federation (the Histadrut) up to 1965. However, the focal problem was that the State of Israel confiscated around 40% of Palestinian land to be used for development projects.[5] However, from the majority of such state’s development projects, mostly exactly Israeli Jews profited but not Israeli Arab Palestinians.
One of the basic claims by the Arab Palestinians in Israel is that all Israeli authorities are systematically discriminating against them by allocating very few resources for health care, education, public works, economic development, or resources for municipal governmental authorities to the Arab-populated land. Another general claim is that Israeli Palestinians are as well as systematically discriminated against for the right to preserve and develop their cultural, national, and political identity. As a matter of fact, Israeli Palestinians have been up to 1967 totally isolated from the Arab world but as well as very much understood by other Arabs as traitors who left to live in the oppressive Zionist anti-Arab State of Israel. However, since The 1967 Six-Day War, the majority of Israeli Palestinians have become more self-confident in their Arab Palestinian national identity, especially during the last 20+ years as Zionist Israeli authorities prohibited commemorating the Al Nakba which is either the expulsion or flight of at least 500.000 Arab Palestinians in 1948−1949 during the first Arab-Israeli war.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović
Ex-University Professor
Vilnius, Lithuania
Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies
Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
References:
[1] About the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see in [Martin Bunton, The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013].
[2] Nevertheless, in some cases, the Israeli Central Elections Committee in practice used very politically coloured criteria to discriminate against those Arab Palestinians whose political views are understood to be unacceptable, especially at the time of the parliamentary elections.
[3] About the ideological-political background of the creation of Israel as a nation-state of the Jews, see in [Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: The Historic Essay that Led to the Creation of the State of Israel, Skyhorse, 2019].
[4] Semitic peoples are supposed to descend from Shem, son of Biblical Noah. Particularly it is assumed for the Jews, Arabs, Ancient World’s Phoenicians, and Assyrians [Alan Isaacs, et al (eds.), A Dictionary of World History, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 563]. There is a claim that, in fact, present-day Palestinians descended from the Phoenicians and that the term Palestinians is corrupted Phoenicians.
[5] Israeli Palestinians are commemorating on March 30th Land Day to protest the continuing confiscation of Arab territories by the Israeli Government. The first protest on this day was in 1976 when the Israeli security forces killed six Palestinians. Since this incident, the Palestinians either in the diaspora or in Israel commemorate this day as a national day.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter (X), Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The Great Financial Crisis, the Occupy Wall Street rising, Wikileaks and Snowden exposure, imperialist interventions in Iraq-Libya-Syria, the economic-political developments in Greece, and the on-going string of revelations in the US politics take away all ambiguities related to democracy, development and state. With broad and fundamental connections and character the incidents and processes – parts of democracy and development – being witnessed by the contemporary world are significant with far-reaching implications, and helpful to comprehend issues of democracy, development and state.No ambiguity: Ambiguous and confusing narratives of democracy and development are vigorously sold in markets despite the reality of repeated ...
Could global warming pose the greatest threat to the future of life on the planet? Quite possibly, if we believe the international (and scientific) consensus, despite a widening stratum of debunkers, deniers, and skeptics. What about the prospects of thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia, two countries armed to the max and seemingly moving toward the brink of military conflict? Where does that rate? If the question is asked of most any Beltway denizen, the response might be something along lines of “sounds frightening, but right now we have other priorities, and we can’t lose sight of the ...
It’s frightening. Unprincipled psychologists, in the service of a malignant regime, use sophisticated techniques in order to control the mind of a person from afar.The term “brainwashing” was born in 1950. It is a Chinese word (“xinao”, literally wash brain). Originally it served to describe a technique used – so it was claimed – by Chinese masterminds to manipulate the minds of American prisoners in the Korean War. They changed their unconscious mental processes and turned them into agents of sinister forces.Many books and movies purported to show how this works. For example, the classic film “The Manchurian Candidate” shows ...
The Albanian nationhood as understood in the 19th century was part of a romanticist notion of nationality, i.e., the Albanians were the Balkan people whose mother tongue was Albanian regardless of any confessional division of Albanian people into three denominations (Moslem, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox). Within the north Albanian tribes, especially among the Miriditi, the Roman Catholic Church was very influential. The Roman Catholic Church became the main protector of the Albanian language and cultural heritage and the main protagonist of the national identity of the Albanians in Northern Albania.[1] The expression of common notions of the Albanian nationhood ...
One of the most controversial, influential, and well-known revolutionary organizations in the world was the Irish Republican Army (the IRA) considered to be both patriotic and terrorists.The FeniansIt is of extreme debate the question of its real origin but it is mostly accepted the standpoint that the origins of the IRA are in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the IRB) or popularly known as the Fenians as it grew out of the Fenian movement.[1] The name is coming from the Irish armed forces in legendary times. The Fenian movement was founded as both the Fenian Brotherhood in the USA by John ...
Author’s note and UpdateThe following article was first published in September 2014 at the outset of the air campaign “against the ISIS”. In recent developments Russia has officially joined the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). What are the implications?Amply documented but rarely mentioned in news reports, the ISIS is a creation of US intelligence, recruited, trained and financed by the US and its allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel and Jordan. What this means is that the ISIS terrorists are the foot soldiers of the Western alliance. While America claims to be targeting the ISIS, in reality it is protecting the ISIS. The air campaign is intent upon ...
"Evicted five centuries ago by crusading Christians, the Arabs are back in Spain, using their oil dollars to buy land that was seized from their ancestors by the sword". — James M. Markham, The New York Times, 1981. The Madrid daily ABC wrote that 800 mosques in Spain are out of control. The Spanish daily La Razon charged that Gulf donors, such as Qatar, were a source of Spain's Islamization. The Saudis also launched a new Spanish television channel, Córdoba TV, as did Iran. They dream of, and work to, regain the "lost Caliphate" of Spain. Some Islamists do ...
Much is being written regarding the Charlie Hebdo issue in Paris, France. I do not condone any killing but at the same time I do not support issues that violate human rights, religious freedom or freedom of speech and thoughts. Using cartoons to condemn Divine thoughts and beliefs is utterly wrong because they fall under hate crimes and not under freedom of speech as we are lied about. The perpetrators of hate continue to be protected. Islam is under attack and its adherents, the Muslims, are being targeted through provocation. In a recent article Charlie Hebdo and Tsarnaev’s trial: Cui ...
NATO was always more about offense than defense, about America controlling the policies of Alliance members, increasing their numbers, pressuring them to stress militarism more than they’d chose otherwise – and selling them lots of US weapons.When founded in April 1949, Soviet Russia was a North Atlantic Alliance enemy in name only, ravaged by WW II – needing years after Stalin’s April 1953 death to regain pre-war normality, peace essential to restore it.Washington controls NATO, covering 75% of its budget, calling the shots, installing subservient Alliance officials to serve its agenda.At a time when no US enemies exist, they’re invented ...
In recent years, both the Western as well as the liberal Russian press have had a lot to say about Russian “barbarianism,” as if to contrast it with European “civilization.” But a closer inspection – through the prism of the heroic pages of Russian history – of the two groups’ moral ideals and actual lives presents us with quite a different picture.For example, in pagan times, ancient Russians never worshipped a god of war, although their contemporaries in Europe were transfixed by their own martial deity, constructing an entire epic narrative around the concepts of war and conquest.After defeating the ...
This weekend 75 years ago, the German city of Dresden was razed to the ground by British and American aerial bombardment. At least 25,000 mainly civilians were destroyed in raid after raid by over 1,200 heavy bombers, indiscriminately dropping high explosives and incendiaries. It took seven years just to clear the rubble.The destruction of Dresden, a world-famous cultural center of Baroque majesty, has been long dogged by controversy. Official British and American military accounts claim it was necessary to hasten the collapse of the Third Reich; with a reasoning that resonates with US claims for dropping the atomic bombs on ...
On September 16, 1982, Christian Lebanese militiamen allied to Israel entered the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila and the adjacent neighborhood of Sabra in Beirut under the watch of the Israeli army and began a slaughter that caused outrage around the world. Over the next day and a half, up to 3500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were murdered in one of the worst atrocities in modern Middle Eastern history. The New York Times recently published an op-ed containing new details of discussions held between Israeli and American officials before and during the massacre. They ...
We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy ...
The United States and its NATO allies launched a military intervention in 1999 that helped the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) win its secessionist campaign against Serbia. U.S. officials justified that intervention on the grounds that Serbian security forces were committing pervasive war crimes against the Kosovar insurgents. American supporters of the KLA also asserted that the secessionists were staunch Western‐style democrats mounting a noble resistance against Slobodan Milosevic’s corrupt, brutal regime, and that America had a moral obligation to support them. Speaking at a pro‐Kosovo march in Washington D. C., Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) stated that the “United States of America and the Kosovo ...
The day commemorates lost lives of US servicemen and women sent to war for the wrong reasons – from the 18th century to today, notably America’s so-called War of Independence, its Civil War, WW I and II and all subsequent wars of choice.America’s only enemies in the past 70 years and throughout at least most of its history were and remain ones it invents.It could have been a model peaceful nation had it chosen a different path. Instead, its history reflects unbridled militarism, endless wars of choice, related violence and chaos, contempt for rule of law principles, along with unparalleled ...
As my grief and outrage mount at the predictable escalations of violence in Israel/Palestine, I once again marvel at the chasms of misunderstanding and miscalculations in describing events as they unfold and the script that frames most mainstream media reporting. (Recently, The New York Times is a notable exception.)The both-sides-have-their reasons-but-Israel-is-the-victim stories follow an expected pattern. Israeli Jews, still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, return to their rightful homes and then fight for every inch of what is justly theirs. They are repeatedly faced with intractable Arab terrorists who attack innocent civilians and must be crushed with all the ...
Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis points out the latest travesty of the Western media: 59,000 stories on Auschwitz, three on Jasenovac. As if the third-largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Europe simply never existed. Franjo Tudjman certainly thought so, and it appears the current Croatian leadership shares his "historical" perspective.Contemporary German estimates of Serbs murdered by the Ustasha (in Jasenovac and elsewhere) ranged as high as 750,000. Wiesenthal center uses the number of 600,000. Serbian researchers have spoken of up to 700,000 victims. Modern revisionists, Croat and otherwise, talk of 30-100,000, at most. Among them is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
On December 14, Tom Suárez spoke at The House of Lords, London, at the invitation of Baroness Jenny Tonge. Drawing from his recently published book State of Terror, he addressed the centennial of the Balfour Declaration and his views on the way toward ending today’s Israel-Palestine “conflict”. The following are Suárez’s remarks. The book was reviewed here by David Gerald Fincham.Good evening, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know are your busy schedules to be here now. My thanks to Jenny Tonge for making this meeting possible; and I would like to thank three people without ...
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović
